Conclusions

It was observed that Nametsi Parish is located about 5 kilometres from Bukalasi trading centre and is not accessible by motorable road because of the mountainous terrain. This as confirmed by the sub-county chief of Bukalasi has made community development and sensitisation efforts difficult. For instance, community development officers, who would be frequently sensitising people, are reportedly unable to access the area with ease, especially when it rains. This is certainly a contributing factor to the lack of preparedness exhibited by inhabitants of the area. Participants asserted that there were no prior sensitisations about preparedness for landslide disasters and therefore they did not know how to respond when the landslide hit. Many of them reacted by impulse in response to the disaster; some knelt down and prayed to God, others ran away, some immediately ran to the scene of the disaster unaware of the fact that they would be victims of successive landsliding although non was reported. The lack of preparedness may have exacerbated the effects of the 2010 landslide.

Place and proximity played a significant role in influencing people’s perceptions of risk to landslides in light of the 2010 landside disaster at Nametsi. At the time of the study, people’s memories were still fresh even though the disaster site had been covered by vegetation. Many said they were afraid of landslides because of what they

11

witnessed. However, this did not have the same effect on their willingness to move to safer locations because some of the respondents notably said they did not want to move citing various reasons as presented in chapter 5. Some insisted that their households were in safe locations and would not be affected by future landslides. From the individual accounts in this study, there was an implied voice of hope and optimism among some respondents that there will be no more landslides in their lifetime, which makes them more resilient and adaptive. Ziedonis (2006) showed that risk perception is often coupled with over-optimism, which involves predicting that favourable events are more likely or more positive than they actually are. When individuals are confronted with complex information, preventing them from rational decisions, over-optimism often sets in prompting them to estimate events beyond their control to be terrifically positive. Often, they are instead likely to attribute bad outcomes to external forces such as bad luck rather than to their personal bad choices of action.

Results show that perceptions can be reliably mapped by classifying, coding, and geocoding them as ‘high risk perception’, medium risk perception or ‘low risk perception’ based on perceived knowledge of causes of landslides, level of risk fear, perceived household safety and willingness to move to safer locations. It is however important to note that the classes are not clear cut and conclusive but unique based on mapping methodologies that are not purely conventional as described in sections 3.4.2.and 5.8., Level of risk fear for instance was high among individuals who perceived their households as unsafe from future landslides and low among those who perceived their households as safe. But there was some contradiction between perceived household safety and reasons for not moving because some of the respondents who claimed that their households were safe from future landslides also said they were unable to move because of poverty and marginalization. There were also contradictions between levels of fear for landslides and perceived household safety. Many of those, who said they were afraid of landslides, again claimed that their households were safe from future landslides.

It was observed that there exists a dormant Disaster Management Committee in the District comprising of district officials. It does not include representatives from landslide risk prone areas and is only active when there is a disaster. The reason given

for this status quo was lack of resources to keep the committee active at all times. Few households in this research expressed much concern about the protection of their physical safety or safety of their homes and possessions mainly because they had survived previous landslides including the most devastating 2010 disaster. What stands out, rather, is the desire to protect what Giddens (1991) calls ontological security. According to Giddens, an ontologically secure person is someone who is free from existential doubts and who is able to believe that life will continue in much the same way as it always has – without threat to the familiar representations of time, space and identity.

Because some people are so attached to their fertile land for farming as their only source of livelihood, I would presume that perhaps they would be willing to move if only they could have access to their land to continue cultivating and dealing in farm and animal produce. Although this may not be a perfect solution from an environmental point of view, it is a viable solution in terms of saving lives. This is because if a household is made up of 5 people, they will all move and only one or two will return to cultivate and trade on a temporary basis.

Interestingly, in spite of the fact that landslides have rocked this area and surroundings since 1989, government has been extending social services and facilities such as health centers and schools to the people in the study area. This I believe has been one of the major contributing factors to the relentless settlements. In the 2010 Nametsi landslide, the rocks and mud buried a government health center with all its occupants at the time of the disaster.

There was no early warning system for landslides in the area before the landslide happened in 2010 and there is no intention to introduce one because government has declared the area to be risk prone and unfit for human settlement. Everyone has been ordered to vacate the area and move to safer locations. This implies that there will be no serious preventative efforts by government in future.

6.5. Recommendations

Decision makers and those who promote and regulate health and safety need to understand how people living in risk prone areas such as Bududa think about landslide risks and how they respond to such risks. This information can be easily presented in written reports but using maps presents a valuable supplement to the efforts. I recommend using maps of peoples’ perceptions to facilitate disaster planning and management before landslides occur and for quick decision-making processes during and after a landslide disaster. Such maps are capable of summarizing and simplifying descriptive data in times of crisis, where time is critical to saving lives.

The question of why respondents in such a high-risk area did not show substantial concrete risk prevention behavior cannot be adequately answered fully in this study based on the available data because I did not control for the actual risk level that each respondent faced. However, as results indicate, there is a possibility that respondents were not informed enough to decide appropriately. I therefore recommend that hazard maps showing potential landslide locations should be made available to the affected populations as part of the sensitization materials with appropriate symbology in order to stimulate and maximize appropriate risk precautionary behavior. These should be displayed in public places at village level accessible to all members of the affected communities accompanied by explanatory materials in local languages and where possible personnel to give additional explanations to the local people where needed. It is also important to take note of people’s skepticism about government programs as reported in section 3.6 and chapter 5 and apply appropriate measures to ensure acceptability and effectiveness of such programs.

The District Disaster management Committee should lobby for funds from multiple sources to carry out routine activities especially vigorous sensitization. Local representatives from affected areas should also be part of the committee because they can help to coordinate activities in their respective areas via telephone.

There is need to improve accessibility to Bukalasi and Bumayoka Sub-counties to ease sensitization efforts and improve interconnectivity of the two sub-counties with business centers in other areas within and outside the district. This will also encourage

settlers to migrate to safer locations and ably commute to their farms in the high-risk areas. In the short-run, lives will be safe and in the long-run, affected people can be convinced to acquire farmland elsewhere so as to allow the natural vegetation in the area to regenerate.

Government should not provide social services and facilities to disaster prone areas. They should instead be situated in the nearest safe locations such that people living in such unsafe areas can feel the need to relocate. In other words, this will serve as a pull factor to attract those living in disaster prone areas. Otherwise, in addition to losing lives, government will continue to incur losses whenever such disasters happen.

6.6. Suggestions for Future Research

There is need for deeper research on the use of GIS in mapping perceptions of vulnerability. The indicators used in this study to categorize perceptions were;

perceived knowledge of causes of landslides, level of risk fear, perceived household safety and willingness to move to safer locations. I suspect that specific,

multidimensional perception indicators, matched with similarly specific and more detailed survey questions, could uncover stronger perception–vulnerability relationships than those observed using very general one-dimensional indicators in my study because of time constraints. Developing multidimensional risk or vulnerability indicators for integration with survey research would in itself be a substantial project, needing more geographical diversity (or degrees of freedom) than the two Sub-counties covered in this study. This case study has some limitations. The sample was limited to a specific geographic region and as such, the findings may not generalize to persons who experience other landslides. However, the response rate of the sample was excellent and suggests that the findings would generalize to persons affected by this landslide. The findings also offer some information about how persons within a specific demographic group responded to such a tragic event.

6.7. Summary

Overall, this study concludes that people’s perceptions of vulnerability to landslides in Bududa are a creation of mixed factors and therefore cannot be considered a permanent characteristic of the people in this area. Understanding these perceptions and communicating them to responsible actors is paramount. Mapping perceptions of

risk and adding this information to the existing stock of knowledge on people’s vulnerability to landslides and landslide risk mapping enriches efforts by government and civil society organizations towards better management and mitigation of future landslides before they occur.

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